


A Dark Mirror

by TheAstronomer



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Short One Shot, Yes i tagged Cyril the dog, why not?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 20:01:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14433042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAstronomer/pseuds/TheAstronomer
Summary: This is my first piece of writing for the Peaky Blinders fandom. I've been sitting on it for a while since I watched the Alfie Solomons death scene and the scene immediately after when Tommy goes a bit loco on his 'holiday.'But anyway, that scene haunted me and I knew I wanted to write something based on it. I hope someone enjoys it. It's short and sweet, well short and bitter actually, but that's just how it formed. Some of the details are slightly different from canon.Comments and feedback very welcome.





	A Dark Mirror

A DARK MIRROR

_'Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,_

_As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.'_

It starts. First with Tommy cowering in the dirt on the golf course; cradling himself, grovelling against the grass, his head in his hands as though it was made of glass, as shotguns echoed from nearby fields. His caddy was confused, head moving between where Tommy crouched on the bank of the river and where Tommy's eyes were fixed -nowhere, anywhere - just far from the neat, manicured golf course. The whine of bombs, the staccato pulse of guns are silent to that boy, that perplexed boy with his tidy clothes and confused eyes.

_Strange how on that beach there was a perfect almost-silence, a clarity of light which Tommy had only seen somewhere else once before. Perhaps Alfie Solomons had seen it there too? Had they ever really talked about the war? Beyond just those anecdotes about Italians and duckboards? No, they had not, because Tommy did not talk. And why would they? He was there to kill him now. Bad blood._

Glass after glass of whiskey, then gin, burned Tommy's gullet - slowly, it turned into empty bottles, gathered like flotsam in the hearth of the fireplace. He flailed in the permanently crepuscular light of his poisoned mansion house, his self-imposed prison, as full of empty rooms as his own head. The tang of endless cigarettes; he burned his lip, cut himself on shattered glass, fell over his own limbs. He is lost. He tried to turn to the light flooding in the windows like a plant might seek the light, arms outstretched, but it didn’t reach him. How could it?

The mad ones in the trenches sometimes went up with arms outstretched like that, mumbling, crying, up, up into the light of No Mans Land, before they could be stopped. Scrabbling through the mud to be cut down amongst the barbed wire.

_'Riddled with cancer, mate. Something to do with the gas in France.' There was an endless horizon of sea, of blinking sky and emptiness. 'I wanted it to be here, Tommy.' Bad blood. They are both made of nothing but bad blood._

_Why did he want the dog with him at the end? Like a sentinel to his death. Tommy did not ponder long. He himself knew he would be utterly alone at his own death, regardless of who brought him it._

There was a voice from far away, muffled and indistinct.

'Mr Shelby?'

Frances, worried. A distant voice asking about summoning doctors, or Polly. But Tommy was totally submerged now. He was not sure if he was partly in his own body or floating entirely free of it. It was not a liberation, it was a loss, a drift from himself.

'I know what this is. It's just myself, talking to myself about myself.'

This punctuated by an impatient flick of his arm. What else could it be? A ruined man so far from himself that his own son did not recognise him. Tommy couldn't even begin to hold his fractured head together but he tried, grasping it in both shaking hands even as he cracked it off the heavy furniture where he fell.

_Ah Alfie, you always were a fucking lying cunt. No surprise at the gun which was produced lightning quick by the deceptively shambolic figure. The disturbance to the sea air was only temporary. Another vanquished enemy?_

_It was fitting that they both bled on that beach._

Now Polly was here, solid and real but talking of spirits and devils, incorporeal things. Blood again, gypsy blood.

'We live somewhere between life and death,' she said. 'Waiting to move on and in the end we accept it. We shake hands with devils and walk past them.'

Through a glass darkly, Tommy Shelby stared at himself.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The piece of poetry at the beginning is from 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' by Wilfred Owen, one of the most moving and visually excoriating poems about WW1 ever written.


End file.
